Saturday, December 17, 2011

A Question of Precedence

a question of precedence:

the human mind is a powerful tool, apparently, as it can shape events. and the universe is ever changing. in an excited, unstable and highly emotional state, the mind can warp reality, indeed perhaps even change natural laws which hold in more normal, settled times. this is how it seems. now this could be dismissed as just flawed perception, that the actual universe has not changed, but to do so would be to dismiss and underweight perception and consciousness itself, to deny personal experience as important. in someone's strange, wild and crazy world, unusual things are happening! there is an assumption that we receive correct data from an "external world" to our brain and to our senses, that there is no great individual power to change this "external world" through our being, that there is no forceful feedback that can alter the state of it, so to speak.

posit that a great, and mad, scientist, perhaps in a dream, perhaps from an unusual experience, perhaps in an epiphany, creates a theory of how something works. his or her mind is engrossed with theoretical possibilities and detail, mechanical metrics and hypotheses and statistics. he or she, very excited, doesn't sleep for days and, when he or she does, has strange vivid dreams. then this mad scientist invents a machine or test to determine whether this hitherto only theoretical stuff is true or works. and it does. the question is, is this really science, is this the way things were or has the scientist changed them? or is it magic, is he or she actually a wizard of some kind? or just the god of this new machine and theory?

there may be true natural laws which came before thought chanced upon them, but what if we have altered the universe with our minds, created new systems, which we now label as "science"?